WoW – More fun together!

L2P Nub

So there we were in POS, Analogue in tree form and Reversion’s second bear tank, the undergeared one. Soon as we saw the loading screen we knew we were in for fun. His second bear is lightly geared, has some holes, and was running with an experimental high-agility build. That’s why I bring Analogue along when we want to run instances with that tank; she’s usually able to keep things up just fine, but I know some of the POS pulls are fun..

We get a warlock, a dk, and a paladin. The warlock hasn’t been here before on this character; he asks people to “share quests” and we remind him to talk to Jaina at the portal in. This is halfway through the first pull. He says “Ok, can I brb?” and we give him permission, starting in on the next pull. Then I notice his health bar is going down… and down… he’s managed to aggro the caster mobs that everyone always skips these days. So Reversion and I go back and res him. Well now he’s got the quest, so we keep going.

First boss is fine. Then we wipe after that because I’m careless and not looking where the tank is and run into the ambushers. Oops. That was dumb. We get back, clear to Ick and Krick, kill them, and start up the hill. It takes all my button spamming but the first two groups go down and everyone is alive. The paladin seems to have a broken cleanse button so we have to wait around after the fight for the diseases to wear off, but it’s going ok.

The next set of mobs, Reversion tells the DK to run to one caster and death grip the other caster on top. Wonder of wonders he listens, we take out that group. We go to do the second group – and wipe; I have no idea why. Everyone runs back, except for the dk. He didn’t run back last time either and this time he’s under the mobs and I couldn’t rez him if I wanted to. We tell him to release, wait for him to do it or reply or… nothing. So he gets kicked and a mage joins the party. A mage with a gear score higher than mine and an ego to match.

The first pull wasn’t bad; Reversion kept aggro, we’d already killed one caster and the mage’s blizzard didn’t pull off. Now it was time for the tunnel. Reversion gave the standard rundown; get to the middle, don’t dps till then, don’t get ahead of the tank. We run to the plate, kill everything. One of the dps goes down; I have just enough time to rez before we’re in combat again. We start off up the tunnel but it’s taken long enough there are a lot on the bear. Since this alt only has 29k hit points in bear form, Reversion stops to kill a few adds. The mage and paladin, however, don’t stop. I sigh as their health bars go down, and then ours go down, and it’s a wipe.

“???” says the mage. “You don’t stop in the tunnel nub”.

“You do if the tank needs to kill the adds,” Reversion points out.

“You fail as a tank. L2P nub.” And he quits party, just like that.

Needless to say we finished the tunnel and the boss fight without any trouble at all.

I think the problem is that for a lot of people, unless you’ve played a role it’s hard to tell the difference between “bad” and “undergeared”. You can tell good geared players easily. You can tell bad ungeared players really easily. You can even tell bad geared players – they’re the ones with a 6k gearscore and 2k dps. But it’s hard sometimes to tell if a player is bad, or just lightly geared. If you wipe on hard fights, sometimes it’s just because you’re short on health. I’ll point out that Reversion’s second bear is better geared than his primary bear was the first few times we ran H POS; gear inflation is insane these days. But the mage wasn’t willing to stick around to see which was the case. We’d deviated from his knowledge of “how you do the tunnel”; he couldn’t see that the reason why was a good one, so he left.

Still, who’s the bigger idiot, the tank who stops or the mage who keeps going?

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2 Responses

If he and the other dps that went ahead had stopped with us we would have downed a couple skellies, my health bar would have stabilized, and a few seconds after stopping we could have run to the end. People who lack the ability to think critically on the fly simply latch onto a tactic as ‘the way you do it’ and consider anything else as dumb. You see these types in BGs arguing furiously over two tactics that both work, but only if you pick just one and do it. They each think one is better (because it worked for them that one time) and argue to the death over it. Good players think and adapt.

The last fight of PoS is a good example. I had tanked that many times before I got in there healing a very under geared tank and someone advised him to kite the boss over the ice on the enrages. Great plan right? Since All the times I had done it before that were as a well geared tank with an outstanding healer I had never had to do that. Hadn’t occurred to me at all to kite him. Then, when I have run the newer weaker tank in there with pug healers I always kite. A couple times people have berated me for moving the boss around. heh.

I’m with you two – the mage is the one that was an idiot. It does no one any good to see the tank (and the healer!) stop to kill some skeletons if the DPS shoot on by. Especially if they could see the tank’s health was failing and would have benefited from some solid heals and getting rid of some adds before continuing to the end.

Perhaps it’s because I AM a healer, but if I can see that the tank’s health is hurting before the end of the tunnel (and there have been some close calls before) then I would much rather stop and heal/kill before continuing. If my tank stops, I stop. I can dodge a little ice for a bit.

But as to the gearscore? I honestly don’t look. I don’t have the little addon or whatever. I take what is given to me at the beginning of the group and if the group struggles, I do my best to heal. If the group is just SO fantastically horrible and/or hard I can’t take it, I’ll leave after a few attempts. From what I can gather about gearscore, it’s rather unfair and/or inaccurate, so I don’t pay much mind to it. However, I HAVE had someone say, “Priest’s gearscore is too low, I’m out guys” once and I couldn’t believe they would say that. Too naive on my part?